Perfect is the enemy of good.

“Stop worrying where you’re going,” the Sondheim lyric goes. “Move on.”

‘All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’ — Pascal

Voltaire, on his deathbed, was asked to renounce Satan and embrace God. He declined, saying this was “no time to be making new enemies.”

Life: You live it forward but understand it backward. - Abraham Verghese in Cutting for Stone

“I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralisation, degradation, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.”

“There was no wealth here, or if there was, it was hidden. The profits of the cotton crop did not appear to enrich anyone in the Delta. Probably someone in Jackson or Memphis lived well on this harvest”